One Word, many wordings: The Inspiration of Scripture in its Christological and Pneumatological Dimension of Depth

Abstract

Robert Brown has argued that any defence of the authority of Scripture based on its divine inspiration must take account of the reality of the form of Scripture. He points to two facts regarding the Bible’s form (the history of textual error and a variety of beliefs regarding the biblical canon) that, he believes, compromises such a foundation for biblical authority. Exactly which words, he asks, are we to think were inspired? Brown operates with an understanding of revelation which is exhausted by the category of the biblical proposition (i.e., he equates revelation with Scripture, understanding inspiration to be the mode of that revelation). Accordingly, any error within the constituent parts of the propositions found in the Bible undermines the validity of its claim to be revelation in the first place, thus, in Brown’s view, compromising the entire edifice of Christian theology. In what follows, I suggest that a personalist approach is a more suitable way to understand revelation and that the propositional mode of revelation (Scripture) participates in God’s personal revelation in Jesus Christ through the inspiration of the Spirit. By broadening the theological context of Scripture (i.e., understanding it in its Christological and Pneumatological dimension of depth), its authority is not found in its inerrancy but in its reference beyond itself to God’s actual self-revelation in Jesus which God employs as the permanent mode of his revelation by the agency of the Spirit.